Here’s Jonathon Pie (Tom Walker) with another good rant.
Mind the volume; Jonathon gets a little salty – as usual.
Archive for the ‘Fear Every Government’ Category
Why speech must be free
February 19, 2017Here’s Jordan Peterson speaking late last month* about why free speech is a necessity.
I think he made several very good points (a) about how people think by talking, (b) that suppressing that talk is never a good idea, and (c) about the limits of the U.S. Constitution, which is intended to limit bad players in government.
* From the YouTube notes:
On January 23, 2017, the Runnymede Society at Queen’s University law school hosted a mock debate between Jordan Peterson and Bruce Pardy (playing devil’s advocate) on the subject of Bill C-16, specifically on gender pronoun usage, and broadly on speech legislation. This video is an excerpt from the Q&A portion that followed.
The full video is available on both Runnymede Society’s channel and Jordan Peterson’s channel.
On Peterson’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAQlleqDgbI
On Runnymede Society channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzkNHpiJ7AE
When will these be people be investigated, convicted, and sentenced?
January 17, 2017Here’s a pretty horrifying story in the State-Is-Not-Your-Friend category.
Some social workers in California presumably lied and falsified evidence about a case involving taking a mother’s children from her custody. What the article doesn’t say, unfortunately, is whether these people are being investigated for those crimes.
You really need to read the whole thing. (Emphasis in the original.)
Judges Reject Orange County’s Claim That Social Workers Didn’t Know Lying In Court Was Wrong
Using taxpayer funds, government officials in Orange County have spent the last 16 years arguing the most absurd legal proposition in the entire nation: How could social workers have known it was wrong to lie, falsify records and hide exculpatory evidence in 2000 so that a judge would forcibly take two young daughters from their mother for six-and-a-half years?
From the you-can’t-make-up-this-crap file, county officials are paying Lynberg & Watkins, a private Southern California law firm specializing in defending cops in excessive force lawsuits, untold sums to claim the social workers couldn’t have “clearly” known that dishonesty wasn’t acceptable in court and, as a back up, even if they did know, they should enjoy immunity for their misdeeds because they were government employees.
A panel at the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this week ruled on Orange County’s appeal of federal judge Josephine L. Staton’s refusal last year to grant immunity to the bureaucrats in Preslie Hardwick v. County of Orange, a lawsuit seeking millions of dollars in damages. In short, judges Stephen S. Trott, John B. Owens and Michelle T. Friedland were not amused. They affirmed Staton’s decision.
But to grasp the ridiculousness of the government’s stance, read key, Oct. 7, 2016 exchanges between the panel and Pancy Lin, a partner at Lynberg & Watkins. […]
And pity the Orange County taxpayers who are paying attorneys to defend these people.
You’re on your own. Act accordingly.
December 16, 2016This post originally appeared October 5th, 2016. (My emphasis.)
surveillance, whistleblowing, and security engineering
[Update (12/14/16): Reuters has specified that the rootkit was implemented as a Linux kernel module. Wow.]
Yesterday morning, Reuters dropped a news story revealing that Yahoo installed a backdoor on their own infrastructure in 2015 in compliance with a secret order from either the FBI or the NSA. While we all know that the US government routinely asks tech companies for surveillance help, a couple aspects of the Yahoo story stand out:
1. The backdoor was installed in such a way that it was intercepting and querying all Yahoo Mail users’ emails, not just emails of investigation targets.
2. The program was implemented so carelessly that it could have allowed hackers to read all incoming Yahoo mail. Of course this also means FBI/NSA could have been reading all incoming Yahoo mail.
3. Yahoo execs deliberately bypassed review from the security team when installing the backdoor. In fact, when members of the security team found it within weeks of its installation, they immediately assumed it had been installed by malicious hackers, rather than Yahoo’s own mail team. (This says something about what the backdoor code may have looked like.)
4. Yahoo apparently made no effort to challenge this overly-broad surveillance order which needlessly put hundreds of millions of users at risk.
At the time this was happening, I was on the Yahoo Security team leading development on the End-to-End project. According to the Reuters report, the mail backdoor was installed at almost the exact same time that Alex Stamos and I announced the open-source launch of a Chrome extension for easy-to-use end-to-end encryption in Yahoo Mail at SXSW 2015. Ironically, if only we had been able to actually ship E2E, we would have given users a way to protect themselves from the exact backdoor scenario that they ended up in! […]
Most of all, keep pushing for end-to-end encryption.
H.T. Paul B
Since you can’t generally verify your e-mail provider’s security, you can’t trust their security. The only alternative is to provide your own security.
And the bigger lesson is that the U.S. government is relentless in its secret surveillance.
Coming soon to a country near you?
November 18, 2016Britain has passed the ‘most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy’
The law forces UK internet providers to store browsing histories — including domains visited — for one year, in case of police investigations.It’s 2016 going on 1984.
The UK has just passed a massive expansion in surveillance powers, which critics have called “terrifying” and “dangerous”.
The new law, dubbed the “snoopers’ charter”, was introduced by then-home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and took two attempts to get passed into law following breakdowns in the previous coalition government.
Four years and a general election later — May is now prime minister — the bill was finalized and passed on Wednesday by both parliamentary houses.
But civil liberties groups have long criticized the bill, with some arguing that the law will let the UK government “document everything we do online”.
It’s no wonder, because it basically does. […]
H.T. Paul B
What Britain needs is the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. And let’s hope those will protect the U.S. from laws like this.
You’ll need to read the article to learn about the features of this new law (the Investigatory Powers Bill). There’s a lot more to it than just storing your browser’s history.
Who knew that little DARPA project would turn into a gigantic honeypot?
Next up? Making civilian use of encryption illegal.
Since Britain is probably the place with the most CCTV cameras per person I suppose this isn’t too much of a surprise. Britons have been subject to everyday surveillance for years now.
And the Anglosphere has already been surveilling private communications — see Snowden’s documents about the Five Eyes alliance. This British law makes (some of) that surveillance legal, rather than surreptitious.
The only safe assumption is that there is no anonymity or privacy on any network.
Curiouser and curiouser
October 7, 2016Here’s interesting news from CNN about hacked voting systems, publishing hacked DNC documents, and the coming election.
US accuses Russia of trying to interfere with 2016 election
US officially blames Russia for political hacksWashington (CNN)The Obama administration said Friday it was “confident” that Russia was behind recent hackings of emails about upcoming US elections in an attempt to interfere with the process.
The announcement marks the first time the US administration has officially accused Russia of hacking into US political systems. Earlier in the week, the two countries broke off formal talks about a ceasefire in Syria.
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement.
“The recent disclosures of alleged hacked emails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” the statement added. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.”
The announcement was referring to the breach of Democratic National Committee emails and the sites of other Democratic Party-linked organizations disclosed over the summer. […]
I’m not sure what to make of this report. Taking it at face value leaves me wondering what the Russian intent is. Do they want to discredit the Democrats (and thus Clinton) by releasing hacked documents and so sway voters to elect Trump? Would Putin prefer Trump as his counterpart? That seems the obvious conclusion – if the Russian Federation really is behind the hacking.
Or maybe the situation’s like a spy novel and there are wheels within wheels here. Is the Obama administration making this announcement with the hope that people will reach the conclusion above? Does the White House want to make sure people think that Russia favors Trump and so sway voters to Clinton? President Obama has endorsed Clinton after all.
That seems a bit of a stretch, since it’s sure to cause another kerfuffle with the Russians – at a time when relations are already a bit sour over Syria.
It all leaves me wondering who’s playing whom here. And I suppose that’s a third point: that I’m not confident I can trust this administration to play "straight baseball".
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the President’s administration gamed the American public.
Update: Wow, this was quick. The WSJ reports this evening (~10 PM EST):
WikiLeaks Stirs Up Trouble for Hillary Clinton
Email correspondence is said to show excerpts of paid speeches before her presidential bidThe organization WikiLeaks on Friday released what it claimed to be Clinton campaign email correspondence revealing excerpts from paid speeches that Hillary Clinton gave in recent years, before her presidential bid.
A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to verify whether the documents are authentic.
The emails appear to show Mrs. Clinton taking a tone in private that is more favorable to free trade and to banks than she has often taken on the campaign trail. The emails also suggest she was aware of security concerns regarding electronic devices, which could feed into criticism that Mrs. Clinton was careless with national secrets when she was secretary of state.
The release marks the latest time WikiLeaks has inserted itself into this year’s presidential campaign, and it came the same day the U.S. intelligence community accused the Russian government of trying to interfere in the U.S. elections by purposefully leaking emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee and other entities. The intelligence agencies alleged the hacks were directed by the most senior officials in the Russian government, with WikiLeaks one of the entities whose methods are consistent with those of a Russia-directed effort.
“Earlier today the U.S. government removed any reasonable doubt that the Kremlin has weaponized WikiLeaks to meddle in our election and benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy,” said Clinton spokesman Glen Caplin in a statement. “We are not going to confirm the authenticity of stolen documents released by [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange who has made no secret of his desire to damage Hillary Clinton.”
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails were WikiLeaks’s primary target, sent several tweets on the subject late Friday.
“I’m not happy about being hacked by the Russians in their quest to throw the election to Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Don’t have time to figure out which docs are real and which are faked.” […]
Obviously, the Democrats want us to think that Wikileaks is trying to get Trump elected. I think it’s a safe guess that the president agrees with that. So the question left is whether the Russians are coordinating and/or controlling what Wikileaks is doing as the administration claims.
We’re not in Mayberry anymore
October 6, 2016Radley Balko writes about a recently released documentary.
‘Do Not Resist’: A chilling look at the normalization of warrior cops
The haunting thing about the new policing documentary “Do Not Resist” is what it doesn’t show. There are no images of cops beating people. No viral videos of horrifying shootings. Sure, there are scenes from the Ferguson protests in which riot cops deploy tear gas. But there’s no blood, no Tasings, no death. Yet when it was over, I had to force myself to exhale.
What makes this movie so powerful is its terrifying portrayal of the mundanities of modern policing. I watched the movie weeks ago, but there are scenes that still flicker in my head. We all remember the clashes between police and protesters in Ferguson. We’ve seen the photos. We saw the anger and the animus exchanged across the protest lines. What we didn’t see were the hours and hours before and after those moments. We didn’t see the MRAPs and other armored vehicles roll in, one at a time, slowly transforming an American town into a war zone. We didn’t hear the clomp of combat boots on asphalt in the quiet hours of the early morning, interrupted only by fuzzy dispatches over police radio. […]
Fittingly, the most chilling scene in the movie doesn’t take place on a city street, or at a protest, or during a drug raid. It takes place in a conference room. It’s from a police training conference with Dave Grossman, one of the most prolific police trainers in the country. Grossman’s classes teach officers to be less hesitant to use lethal force, urge them to be willing to do it more quickly and teach them how to adopt the mentality of a warrior. Jeronimo Yanez, the Minnesota police officer who shot and killed Philando Castille in July, had attended one of Grossman’s classes called “The Bulletproof Warrior” (though that particular class was taught by Grossman’s business partner, Jim Glennon). […]
The trailer:
Apple, Ireland, and more nonsense on stilts
August 31, 2016Here’s Dan Mitchell at International Liberty commenting on the European Commission’s decision to assess Apple billions for alleged unpaid taxes. As the WSJ editorial (linked below) points out, this is a good example of the reasons for Brexit.
But more to the point, the E.C.’s action is a pretty good illustration of the idea that taxation is theft. This attempt is pretty brazen.
European Commission Launches Shakedown of Apple, Asserts Low Taxes Are “State Aid”
[…] But I’ll soon have white hair based on having to deal with the new claim from European bureaucrats that countries are guilty of providing subsidies if they have low taxes for companies.
I’m not joking. This is basically what’s behind the big tax fight between Apple, Ireland, and the European Commission.
Here’s what I said about this issue yesterday. (YouTube video)
There are three things about this interview are worth highlighting.
- First, the European Commission is motivated by a desire for more tax revenue. Disappointing, but hardly surprising.
- Second, Ireland has benefited immensely from low-tax policies and that’s something that should be emulated rather than punished.
- Third, I hope Ireland will respond with a big corporate tax cut, just as they did when their low-tax policies were first attacked many years ago.
I also chatted with the folks from the BBC. (YouTube video)
I’ll add a few comments on this interview as well.
- First, to the extent that the European Commission wants to interfere with fiscal policy in member states, it should urge spending caps for profligate welfare states.
- Second, since it’s been in bed with the Europeans on schemes to boost business taxation, the US government can’t throw stones since it lives in a glass house.
- Third, our friends on the left are terrified of a “race to the bottom” but their real motive seems to be a desire for more money to prop up big welfare states.
Here’s an interview from the morning, which was conducted by phone since I didn’t want to interrupt my much-needed beauty sleep by getting to the studio at the crack of dawn. (YouTube video)
Once again, here are a few follow-up observations.
- First, I realize I’m being repetitive, but it’s truly bizarre that the European Commission thinks that low taxes are a subsidy. This is the left-wing ideology that the government has first claim on all income.
- Second, it’s a wonky point, but Europe’s high-tax nations can use transfer pricing rules if they think that Apple (or other companies) are trying to artificially shift income to low-tax countries like Ireland.
- Third, the U.S. obviously needs to reform its wretched corporate tax system, but that won’t solve this problem since it’s about an effort to impose more tax on Apple’s foreign-source income.
The Wall Street Journal opined wisely on this issue, starting with the European Commission’s galling decision to use anti-trust laws to justify the bizarre assertion that low taxes are akin to a business subsidy.
Even by the usual Brussels standards of economic malpractice, Tuesday’s €13 billion ($14.5 billion) tax assault on Apple is something to behold. Apple paid all the taxes it owed under existing tax laws around the world, which is why it hasn’t been subject to enforcement proceedings by revenue authorities. […]
This is amazing. […]
Update: 9/2/16
Here’s a report from CNN Money about the Irish response to the E.C.’s demand.
Ireland is turning its back on a massive tax windfall from Apple.
The Irish government confirmed Friday it would appeal a European Union order to collect 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) in back taxes from the tech giant.
The European Commission ruled Wednesday that Ireland had helped Apple artificially lower its tax bill for more than 20 years, assistance that it said constituted illegal state aid for the company.
Apple (AAPL, Tech30) has already said it will appeal. CEO Tim Cook has described the Commission’s claim that Apple paid Irish tax of just 0.005% on much of its international profits in 2014 as “total political crap.”
Irish politicians were divided earlier in the week over whether to pursue an appeal. And it’s easy to see why.
As recently as 2010, the country was bailed out by the EU and International Monetary Fund. The extra tax billions would go a long way at a time when Irish officials are worried about the impact of Brexit on their economy.
No Truce With Kings 